Abstract
M.Com. (Leadership in Performance and Change)
In August 2012 the South African mining industry was the focus of attention due to an
illegal strike at Lonmin Platinum mine that resulted in the police shooting striking
employees on 16 August 2012. Thirty-four employees lost their lives on that day. An
additional ten people died in violent protests in the build-up to the main shooting
incident. This strike period has become widely known as ‘Marikana’. This historical
incident illustrates how a single incident within an organisation can have an impact at
various levels and affect multiple stakeholders.
The main objective of this study was to identify the effect that the Marikana mining
incident had on Lonmin (the organisation) and its main stakeholders as well as to
identify the effect the stakeholders and Lonmin had on each other. In order to reach
these objectives an historical timeline of the sequence of events surrounding the
Marikana incident was constructed. The main stakeholders involved in the Marikana
incident were then identified, and the relationships and the relative strengths between
these stakeholders were mapped.
The methodology used in the study was Quantitative Narrative Analysis (QNA) as
applied by Franzosi (2010). In particular, the content from English newspaper articles
sourced from South Africa and England relating to the Marikana mining incident for the
period 1 to 24 August 2012 were reviewed, coded and analysed. All relevant data from
the articles were recorded in a manual database, coded according to the semantic
triplet of ‘actors’, ‘actions’ and ‘subjects’ (S-V-O) (Franzosi, 1989) and analysed based
on QNA principles (Franzosi, 2010). First, a sequence analysis was conducted,
identifying the roles (consequences) that the respective actors (stakeholders and subgroupings
of stakeholders) enacted as well as the order in which they unfolded. The
analysis was used to produce a series of network graphs to visually depict the
sequence of events and the respective effects of the sequencing of these events.
These graphs take the form of stake maps and visually tell the story of how events
unfolded and the effects of these events on all the actors involved ...